Some reluctantly nice words for the engineers

It’s E-Week, the time of the year where the engineers of this campus drink, dance, chant and create stuff.

Wait, they do that every week.

The difference is that this week is a public celebration of their faculty and their history of being a group that often makes UBC a lively and interesting place to be.

Last year, we marked the occasion by insulting them, in the grand style of Ubyssey editorials of decades past, branding them “hairy-palmed troglodytes with less social intuition than graphing calculators” who “should spend this week reflecting on what a sad shade of its former self their faculty has become and plan an act of havoc that will regain them a fraction of their departed glory.”

They did not enjoy this editorial, to put it mildly.

Now we’re not going to start up a debate from last year again, but we will point out that engineers were once the Big Men on Campus, and had a unsurpassed reputation for caring about UBC. They often did it in very sexist and boorish ways, but they wanted to engage with campus.

Recently the engineers became more focused on their own community, to the exclusion of the rest of campus. This was one of the things we were lamenting in our disparaging 2011 editorial.

This year’s group of Engineering Undergraduate Society executives has made their desire to spread their particular brand of engineering cheer across campus a priority. They want UBC—and not just other engineers—to know of their ingenuity. We are happy to see this.

They are, they are, they are the engineers—and we hope that they continue to make UBC a more interesting place to be than it would otherwise.

But still, as of this writing, it’s been three years and counting since you hung a Beetle from something. Time’s a-wastin’.

Golden Key’s dubious endorsement

Last weekend, the UBC and SFU chapters of the Golden Key Honour Society held a regional summit in Vancouver. For many of the society’s members, this was the first Golden Key event they had attended—ever.

While some students at the conference had a vague idea what they were doing there (networking, or something like that), others admitted they didn’t know what it was, even after paying the $90 membership.

This makes it somewhat sketchy that the society is endorsed by the president of our university, who said he has little involvement aside from signing the letter. Since students at UBC receive personal messages from Stephen Toope very rarely, he should consider the impact of his endorsement on students paying the fee and joining an organization they’ll probably have little to do with.

An invitation to join a society? Not so special. But an invitation signed by your university president? That becomes infinitely more attractive.

High school students do need to know that it gets better

In our Pride supplement this year, we have an article about why many people involved in the LGBTQ community are skeptical of the It Gets Better campaign, arguing that it encourages a level of complacency.

We don’t necessarily disagree with that, but we also think it’s important to point out that it makes a big difference who the audience is. University students will be much more able to assert themselves and draw on the resources available to them on campus.

Some high school students are also able to do this, but it’s understandably much more difficult for them—even if it’s just because they’re young and inexperienced.

For that reason, then, the It Gets Better campaign provides high school students with a message that university students can sometimes forget needs to be said: high school is not going to be the rest of your life. Once you get out, there are all kinds of opportunities and community resources that you didn’t have access to before.

In fact, this message is something that many other high school students need to hear as well.

Do some research before stuffing your face

The Ubyssey office is a cesspool of bacteria, various fungi and likely a few unique pathogens undiscovered by science. Which is why if The Ubyssey decided to start a restaurant, students would be well-advised to check out its inspection records online, which we would most certainly fail.

However, what students may not realize is that many of the food vendors on campus also have some pretty disgusting things going on. Given our general segregation from the rest of the city, most students don’t have many choices about where they want to eat during the day. This makes it particularly important to get a sense of which restaurants are serving you safely prepared food.

Some cities, such as Toronto, have food inspection records clearly displayed in every restaurant so that customers know what they’re getting into. But until Vancouver adopts something similar, students should go online and find out exactly what they’re putting in their mouths.

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